Return to search

Traffic Analysis Attacks in Anonymity Networks : Relationship Anonymity-Overhead Trade-off

Mix networks and anonymity networks provide anonymous communication via relaying, which introduces overhead and increases the end-to-end message delivery delay. In practice overhead and delay must often be low, hence it is important to understand how to optimize anonymity for limited overhead and delay. In this work we address this question under passive traffic analysis attacks, whose goal is to learn the traffic matrix. For our study, we use two anonymity networks: MCrowds, an extension of Crowds, which provides unbounded communication delay and Minstrels, which provides bounded communication delay. We derive exact and approximate analytical expressions for the relationship anonymity for these systems. Using MCrowds and Minstrels we show that, contrary to intuition, increased overhead does not always improve anonymity. We investigate the impact of the system's parameters on anonymity, and the sensitivity anonymity to the misestimation of the number of attackers. / <p>QC 20130522</p>

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kth-122444
Date January 2013
CreatorsVuković, Ognjen, Dán, György, Karlsson, Gunnar
PublisherKTH, Kommunikationsnät, KTH, Kommunikationsnät, KTH, Kommunikationsnät
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeReport, info:eu-repo/semantics/report, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
RelationTrita-EE, 1653-5146 ; 2013:007

Page generated in 0.0019 seconds